Tag Archives: The Tiger in the Tiger Pit

Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

Kate has set us something a little different this month. We’re all starting from the point at which each of us ended last month. For me that was Janette Turner Hospital’s The Tiger in the Tiger Pit which I had to confess I’d read so long ago I could barely remember it but Google came to the rescue reminding me that it’s about a fraught family celebration.

I’m using the author’s unusual last name as my jumping off point, linking to Austin Duffy’s This Living and Immortal Thing, which is set in a hospital, about a clinical researcher brought uncomfortably face-to-face with the disease he’s studying.

Workplaces rarely seem to feature in fiction although I’ve read several novels set in restaurants including Merrett Tierce’s Love Me Back narrated by Marie – smart, professional and hard-working on the outside – who makes her living waiting tables at a classy Dallas steakhouse.

Kim Thúy’s lovely Mãn also features a restaurant, owned by the husband of a Vietnamese woman who has left her homeland to marry him without ever having met him, a match made for security rather than love.

Which leads me to The Refugees written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who fled with his parents from Vietnam to America in 1975. Written over twenty years, Nguyen’s stories explore the consequences of leaving one’s country under the most difficult of circumstances and its legacy.

From there it’s a very short leap to Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’ breach, a collection of stories based on interviews with residents of the Calais refugee camp which came to be known as the Jungle, now disbanded.

breach is published by Peirene Press who produce just a handful of books a year, one of which was Guđmundur Andri Thorsson’s And the Wind Sees All in 2018. It takes place over the brief bicycle ride that Kata takes to the village hall in preparation for the evening’s concert, taking in the stories of the villagers who catch sight of her out of the corner of their eyes

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from the familiar fictional territory of family reunions, secrets and lies to a two-minute bicycle ride around an Icelandic village. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the routes other bloggers take from each month’s jumping off point, although this month we’ll be starting from entirely different places. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.

Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

We’re starting this month with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a much-loved children’s picture book in which Max is sent to bed with no supper but finds an adventure awaits him.

Which takes me to Julia Donaldson’s Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, a picture book all about books that my bookselling friend’s daughter loved so much it fell to bits.

It’s a small leap from there to Charlie Hill’s Books which lampoons everyone in the book trade, from publishers to booksellers, literary editors to authors, bloggers (how dare he!) to publicists and adds a swipe at performance artists for good measure.

I’ve always loved the title of the tenth volume of Anthony Powell’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ series, Books Do Furnish a Room, although I didn’t get much beyond the second instalment, I’m afraid

No books as I recall in Emma Donoghue’s bestselling Room in which a young woman and her five-year-old son manage to keep sane despite their incarceration in a tiny space.

Donoghue also wrote Frog Music leading me to Lorrie Moore’s collection Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? which I read long before I learned to enjoy short stories and so failed to appreciate it as much as I should have.

I read Janette Turner Hospital’s The Tiger in the Tiger Pit so long ago I can barely remember it but a quick google reminds me that it’s about a fraught family celebration.

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from a children’s picture book classic to the familiar fictional territory of family reunions, secrets and lies. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.